Letters

Lots of traffic? Lovely ...

Andy Beckett ("Roads to nowhere", August 30), described the Shared Space movement's plan for increasing social responsibility on the roads but doubted whether "the interactions on the asphalt would be quite so considerate ... in the sort of society China is becoming". During our visit to Guilin, a city of half a million people in Guangxi province, we found that the road traffic does exactly what Shared Space encourages. In the absence of signs or markings, we didn't know how to get across very busy roads and intersections. Our tour guide told us to walk across the road as if we were in our own home. When we did that, cars and bicycles just naturally flowed around us and we all coalesced in motion. It was a lovely experience and a good example of how a more respectful, communal society can accommodate many different needs at once.Mary Ellen McGuirkDonegal, Ireland

Cold war joke

Frances Stonor Saunders ("We too have such things", September 6) brings out well the contradictions and ironies of the cultural cold war, mentioning East Berlin's Fernsehturm as an example of how "Cold War Modern" took on different meanings. When the sun caused a cross to appear on the panels of the tower's spherical form, citizens of the "capital of the GDR" would joke about "God's revenge on Ulbricht".Melanie SelfeIpswich

More cross-dressers

Rosalind in As You Like It tops Viola in Twelfth Night by one level ("Ten of the best", September 6): male actor plays female character who dresses as a male to escape her tyrannous uncle only to pretend to be a female to help Orlando understand how best to make love to a woman. And - despite hostile surroundings at court and in the forest - there's not a knife to be seen, so it can safely supersede Romeo and Juliet on the National Test agenda for next year.

"To Sherlock Holmes, she is always the woman." This is the first sentence in the first story that records the exploits of the Great Detective. The woman is Irene Adler, opera singer and companion of the nobility, and she has the lot: intelligence, beauty, wit, elegance and courage. She holds indiscreet letters written by a European with aspirations to a throne, and Holmes is commissioned to get them back. He fails. Ms Adler is far too clever for him. For her final deception, she becomes "a slim youth" in an ulster and a bowler. As the only person who ever defeated Holmes, surely she should stand among any "ten of the best"?Clive PorterMaidstone, Kent

Dancing about architecture

Tibor Fischer ("Marked men", September 6) attributes the "quip" that writing about music is like "dancing about architecture" to Elvis Costello. I first heard it in the late 70s, attributed to Frank Zappa. Later, I saw the phrase credited to Thelonious Monk. Presumably there is no definitive source.David BelbunNottingham

Most illustrious

George Steiner offers the judgment ("Tears, tiffs and triumphs", September 6) that the Booker panel of which he was a member was "the most illustrious" in the prize's history - his fellow panellists were Cyril Connolly and Elizabeth Bowen. Whether by "the Booker's history" he meant up until 1972, the first four years, or the full 40 years, it might be instructive to list the panellists either side of 1972: in 1971 they were John Gross, Saul Bellow, John Fowles, Lady Antonia Fraser, and Philip Toynbee; in 1973 they were Karl Miller, Mary McCarthy, and Edna O'Brien. John Berger's G won in 1972; the other books on the shortlist were: Susan Hill's The Bird of Night, Thomas Keneally's The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith and David Storey's Pasmore.Bruce Ross-SmithOxford

Paint and perception

Robert Hughes's comparison of Bacon and Turner ("Horrible!", August 30)fails to note that the two differ not just in their subject matter, but in their use of the elements of form, too. As in Picasso's dictum, "I paint forms as I think them, not as I see them", Bacon's art is fitted to a scheme or concept, but freed from test by perception and evidence. Turner's method, by contrast, is perceptual: space formed by colour changes, shape overlap, and so on. Bacon's admirers need to show how art that ignores vision's formal structure and can be reduced to its maker's biography reaches truths transcending the limitations of its era.David RodwayWoldingham, Surrey

Hitler's home town

Ian Kershaw ("The twisted road to war", August 23) comments on the enthusiasm and welcome Hitler received from jubilant crowds "before reaching his home town of Linz". But Hitler's home town was Braunau am Inn, from which he attempted to eradicate all traces of his ever having been there, "so that no one would ever know from whence he came".Jim SweeneyBirmingham

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